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Environmental Auditing

An Environmental Audit is a method of measuring the environmental impacts of an organisation to enable decisions to be made about managing those impacts.

The benefits of carrying out environmental audits include:

• Ensuring legislative compliance
• Reducing environmental impacts
• Reducing waste, water and energy costs – typically annual savings greater than our fee for the audit.
• Improving relations with stakeholders
• Providing the foundation for an Environmental Management System (EMS) such as ISO 14001 at a later date

Environmental Impacts

The environmental impacts covered by an audit may include:

• Energy
• Carbon dioxide and other emissions
• waste
• water
• transport
• biodiversity
• procurement

If we have recently carried out an Energy Survey or Carbon Footprinting for you, this will reduce the amount of work and so the fee.

The Green Consultancy offers three levels of service as follows.

1 Basic Audit

Impacts covered are:

• energy use
• carbon dioxide emissions (Carbon Footprint)
• solid waste

• water consumption

2 Intermediate Audit

Impacts covered are as Basic Audit plus:

• transport and travel (commuting and business)
• procurement (for example raw materials, food and office consumables)

• environmental policy and practices

3 Baseline Review

Audit is more comprehensive and compliant with ISO 7750 and 14001 standards.

By complying to a recognised standard it is more satisfactory for reporting to stakeholders and provides the starting point for an Environmental Management System (EMS) immediately or as a future option.

A Baseline Review provides the following.

• Audit of all principle environmental impacts over which the organisation has control or influence.
• Gap Analysis of the changes required to improve the organisation’s existing environmental management procedures.
• Legal Compliance Register: listing all regulations applicable to the organisation’s significant environmental impacts.
• Environmental Aspects Register: listing of the organisation’s environmental aspects cross referenced to the Legal Compliance Register.  The register has a significance rating or score for each aspect so that the organisation can determine which are significant and therefore must be managed to meet the chosen standard.
• Written procedures detailing how the organisation ensures that its Legal Compliance Register and Environmental Aspects Register are relevant and maintained, and how the assessment of the significance of the Environmental Aspects is carried out.

In each case a referenced report, including statements of methodology and assumptions, is provided.

Fee Guide

The Green Consultancy provides Environmental Audits for all types of organisations and the following is an approximate indication of our fees (excluding expenses and VAT) for providing each of the above levels of service.

Clients for Environmental Auditing include:

Daily Mail and General Trust

London South Bank University

NAAFI

St George's University London

For information on the Environmental Auditing Process please follow this link.

For your no obligation quote, or to discuss your requirements, please contact Michael Webb or phone him on 08450 176299.